Country.

Straight Man Steve Earle Leaves Addiction Behind

NASHVILLE — Influential country-rocker Steve Earle finally found an exit from addiction, jail and rehabilitation, and it turned out not to be the coffin so often reserved for heroin devotees.

No, this exit was to a new beginning, a spare and searing record titled "Train A-Comin' " that is his eight-record career's first acoustic collection and--as he says himself--its first to be recorded chemically "clean." An awesome re-entry to the recording scene after a four-year absence, the album has spawned a mini-tour of a few major cities with superpickers Peter Rowan, Norman Blake and Roy Huskey. On Aug. 23 the foray is scheduled to kick off at the Vic in Chicago, the metropolitan center of Earle's U.S. popularity.

The album and the tour signal not only a return from the brink of the grave but also a flurry of renewed artistic activity by one of Nashville's most compelling singer-songwriters.

"I never made a record straight until this record--ever," Earle declares of "Train A-Comin'."

"I was a heroin addict when I made `Guitar Town' , although it wasn't common knowledge. Back then, I would clean up and be sick for three days before we went out on the road. And when I was in New York City, any place where I knew the heroin was good and real easy to get and I knew how to get it, I got high."

No more. Professing to be drug-free since last September, Earle waxes proud that "Train" exhibits none of the loss of "edge" that often comes with an artist's renunciation of chemical inspiration.

He adds that "Train" has "every right to be edgy."

"That record was made in January after I was released from jail on Nov. 16, and I still didn't feel great a lot of the time," he explains.

Recorded on little Winter Harvest Records, "Train" features four players--Earle, bluegrass guitarist-mandolinist and harmony singer Peter Rowan, acoustic guitarist Norman Blake and stand-up bassist Roy Huskey--in a stark and raging set of music that the singer describes as "string band rather than bluegrass," apparently meaning it is minus a banjo.

The package of 13 cuts includes three written in the past four years: the haunting "Mystery Train Part II," the bouncy "Angel Is the Devil" and a magnificent ballad titled "Goodbye." There are three or four songs written by others, most notably Lennon and McCartney's "I'm Looking Through You" and Townes Van Zandt's haunting frontier ballad "Tecumseh Valley."

Finally, there are more Earle-written songs of earlier vintage, a wonderful hard-country song titled "Sometimes She Forgets" (which he says is Travis Tritt's next single), and a brace of audience favorites out in the acoustic listening rooms he always visited between his country-rock jaunts. These include such gems as "Hometown Blues," "Mercenary Song" and "Tom Ames' Prayer."

Earle says he never got into the production problem--the writer's block, or whatever--that some artists seem to encounter after they stop using drugs or alcohol. That may have a lot to do with the fact that his work remains full of the energetic angst so often lost after rehabilitation.

"I've seen it happen to other people, and I think it's something they're doing to themselves," Earle says. "I think it's a matter of psyching yourself out, when somebody who can write decides that they can't write anymore because they can't hang out and do this or that."

Another key to Earle's continued edge may be pointed up by his Nashville manager of three years, John Dotson, who has known Earle for a decade. Dotson says that, high or sober, "Steve is Steve--he is the way he is."

"Integrity is still important to him, and when he fights, he fights to the last grain of sand," Dotson says. "And under the tattoos, he's one of the most caring and sensitive people I know."

"Train A-Comin' " is delivered in Earle's tough yet sometimes disarmingly tender style and in a voice best described as nasal and gruff. It now is also a voice he rightly regards as much improved over its previous recording efforts.

"I'm singing the best I've ever sung in my life," he says.

"One thing about it, when you're sitting around sticking needles in your arm and smoking crack, then your voice gets some rest, and it just inadvertently did. And I survived all that and came back, and when I went in to record this record I discovered that a lot . . . had healed, and I have a much better instrument than I had before, because it had got some rest. So some good comes out of everything."

Earle says he didn't go into drug rehabilitation voluntarily. Rather, he went to treatment to get out of jail in Nashville, where he served two months--interrupted by treatment--on a 1993 charge of heroin possession. But he adds that he had very much wanted to escape drug addiction for years; he just had lost all hope of being able to do it.

"I'd go out fully intending to get a Dr. Pepper and wouldn't come back for three days," he says.